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climate change & sustainabilit y
climate change & sustainabilit y
Achim Steiner,
UN Under-Secretary General
and Executive Director,
UN Environment Programme
(UNEP)
Climate change:
time to go that
extra mile
In terms of climate
change, the world is
heading into uncharted
waters as leaders of
the most industrialised
countries prepare to
gather for the G20
summit hosted by Russia
in St. Petersburg.
In May NASA’s Mauna Loa
Observatory in Hawaii announced
that the concentration of carbon
dioxide - the most important
heat-trapping gas - in Earth’s
atmosphere had passed a level of
400 parts per million (ppm) for
the first time in human history.
With world population expected to
increase from 7 billion to over 9 billion
by 2050, experts from the World Bank,
the International Energy Agency,
the United Nations Environmental
Programme (UNEP) and other
organisations estimate that global
average temperatures may rise as much
as 4-5°C this century without decisive
and defining action.
…world population
expected to increase
from 7 billion to over
9 billion by 2050…
But this sobering reality in many ways
masks some remarkable transformations
in the global economy which if
accelerated and scaled-up could lead to
the kinds of emission cuts scientists say
are needed by 2020 and beyond to keep
a global temperature rise under 2°C.
For example in 2012 investment
worldwide in the renewable sector was
$244 billion, a 12% decrease over the
year but still the second highest total
recorded. Indeed since 2006, some $1.3
trillion has been invested.
The geographical spread is also
encouraging with China but also
other developing countries such as
South Africa, Morocco, Mexico and
Chile making increasingly significant
investments. A drop in the cost of solar
photovoltaic technology, by about one-
third since 2011, has also brought the
price of small-scale residential solar
energy much closer to competitiveness
with fossil fuels - an important
democratisation of the climate change
challenge putting the levers of change
into the hands of households and
individual citizens.
There remain those who say renewables
cannot be scaled-up, but this is also
being consigned to history. In July for
example Germany generated a record
23.9 Gigawatts (GW) of electricity from
solar, enough to power 2.3 million
homes. It now generates a quarter of all
electricity from renewable sources.
In the same month, the world’s two
largest economies - and largest emitters
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